


Glottal Stop

by TheBee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:01:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24449263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBee/pseuds/TheBee
Summary: A response to the final chapters of GroovyKat’s Speaking His Language. With a larger dollop of justice for Rose.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	Glottal Stop

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Speaking his Language](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22469572) by [GroovyKat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroovyKat/pseuds/GroovyKat). 



> I love GroovyKat’s Speaking His Language (love me some Eight/Rose). But I found myself dissatisfied with the final chapters. My frustration grew with every re-read. The person who suffered—and I do mean suffered—through that story wasn’t Eight or Ten. It was Rose. And that ending ... The injustice of it even--quite literally and not figuratively "literally"--kept me awake at night. Now it's out of my head and can keep you awake at night instead. This isn't everything Rose deserves after that. I like to think it's closer.

_**“You.”** _

The Doctor and the Moment’s interface glanced over at that one word. The Doctor had never heard Rose’s voice so full of rage. Anger, yeah. Hurt, certainly. Frustation, undoubtedly. But never such rage. And rage it was. Utterly cold. But definitely rage.

The Doctor cleared his throat. “Ah, Rose, this is—“

“We’ve met.”

The Moment, the Doctor saw, was smirking a little at her counterpart. She lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers in an insouciant hello.

Rose just stared. “So what happens to this thing now?” The Moment’s face changed to an affronted expression.

“She gets decommissioned. As she wanted.”

Rose’s eyes flicked over to his. “Wanted?”

He sighed. “Yes. This whole thing was so that all of us would be in a position, have the ability and access to decommission her, for the sake of the universe. She’s too dangerous to leave operational.”

Rose opened her mouth, closed it, thought briefly and opened it again to speak. “So, all of this,” Rose waved backward to her house, with the living quarter TARDISes and the medical facility in the yard, “was so it could commit suicide?”

The Doctor frowned. He hadn’t thought about it that way, but it was a cogent point.

Rose looked the Moment’s interface up and down, snorted rudely, and shrugged, saying, “And you claim you know the Doctor so well. You know very well that, if you wanted to be turned off, you only needed to ask him.” She curled her lip at the interface with, well, her face. “But, no, you’re special. You needed to murder millions of people, destroy thousands of planets, rip a man’s brain apart… just so you could get your way.”

“Rose,” the Doctor said, “it was the only way to get access to her to –“

Rose swiveled her eyes to his. “—says who? It?” Rose snorted again. “Convenient that.”

“Rose, you couldn’t feel it, but Romana made it clear that the end of our life on Gallifrey was a fixed point. It had to happen.”

“Of course,” Rose said flippantly, with that thread of cold rage simmering underneath. It tasted, in his mind, very much like his own. “It made sure that the whole thing was a fixed point. ‘Snot like some outside power waved a magic wand and forced it. No, it chose to manipulate and control and destroy to get what it wants.”

The Moment’s interface looked angrier and angrier and angrier at Rose’s words. “You are a foolish, short-sighted human. You can’t even see time. You cannot even begin to understand me.”

“I don’t need to see time,” Rose rounded on the Moment, “to understand **_you_**. Everyone who’s ever traveled with the Doctor would understand you in a heartbeat. You’re a bully. You’re a selfish, self-centered, self-important bully. The Doctor teaches us how to handle bullies like you three times before breakfast.”

The Doctor frowned to himself. Truthfully, he had been bullied into this whole scenario, from the … moment … of his regeneration to save Rose’s life. Unable to speak to her about her place in his hearts. But without the Moment’s interference, he wouldn’t have Mark or Alirra, either. And he wouldn’t give them up for anything.

He dragged himself out of his thoughts to realize that the Moment’s interface and Rose were glaring at each other. “Rose,” he began gently, “I—“

She ignored him. “I can forget what you did to me,” she hissed at the interface.

 _I can’t,_ he thought to himself.

“I might even forgive what you did to him,” she continued, her face getting more and more set, and her voice getting more and more quiet, “ripping his mind apart, while leaving him embedded in mine for years, like an amputated hand telling me it itches when it doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“You had to be bound to him,” the interface told Rose coolly. “His reward for doing what he needed to do.”

“You don’t even see me as a person,” Rose replied flatly. “Not me. Not the Dahramas. Not Mark and Ally. None of us. Not even him—except for how he can serve you.” Her voice lifted suddenly, in a mannerism that panged him with its familiarity as his own. “But it’s for the greater good, isn’t it? All that death. All that murder. All that destruction. It’s all for the greater good, isn’t it … Grindlewald?”

The interface laughed at her. “You dare to compare me to a fictional character? With my capabilities and my destructiveness and you compare me to a children’s book?”

“Yeah,” Rose replied softly. “Yeah, I dare. Because there’s one real problem with what you did.”

The Moment lifted an eyebrow at her.

“You hurt my children. And you did it _wearing my face_.”

Oh. The source of Rose’s implacable cold anger was suddenly very clear to him.

“Thousands of faces you could have picked. Susan’s. Alistair’s. Even Jack’s. But no. You stole mine. And then you patted yourself on the back for the cleverness of your own cruelty. You hurt Mark. And you really hurt Alirra.” Rose crossed her arms and thrust her chin out. “You’re nothing more than a bully. You want it easy. You just want to be gone and leave everyone to pick up the wreckage behind you. Well, you don’t deserve to get what you want.”

The Moment frowned. “It’s not about what I deserve—“

“It is, actually.”

Both figures whipped around to stare at him. They’d forgotten him entirely, he suspected, judging from the looks of identical surprise on their equally identical faces.

“How long, Rose?” he asked.

“How long?”

“How long did our bond sit in your head like an amputated hand?” And, oh, wasn’t that an image he was going to retain against his will.

“Three and a half years,” she replied, her cold mask cracking somewhat.

“Then that’s how long,” he said, tossing his sonic in the air and catching it.

The Moment’s interface went abruptly still. “What?”

“That’s my line,” he snapped back at her. “Three and a half Earth years for Rose, Mark and Alirra. That makes ten and a half years, cumulatively, that my family suffered without me. Stuck in limbo because you decided to play games with them. I may be Time’s Champion, but they didn’t sign up for that. Ten and a half Earth years, I think. That will do for you.”

The Moment’s interface gave him a horrified look. “Ten and a half years of what?”

Rose’s gaze had grown sharper when he’d added Mark and Alirra’s time to her own. She glanced over at the interface, then back to him, in a small flick of the eyes.

“I’m going to go to your interface. I’m going to remove your activation circuit—which I can do—and I’m going to give it to Rose. For ten and a half Earth years, you can remain aware that you still exist and someone, somewhere, sometime, just **_might_** find you and figure out how to use you. Contemplate those timelines for a while.”

“Time Lord, you know I am too powerful to keep existing! You know that! You swore!”

Goaded at last, he turned on the interface. “You are under the mistaken notion that there are no penalties for your interference in my lives! I have no intention of letting you, or any other entity, get rewarded by hurting my mate or children.” He reached out for Rose’s hand. It was cold and clammy in his own. “Eventually, if you behave yourself for ten and a half years, I’ll turn you off as you demanded. Until then, neither of us want to see or hear from you.”

“And stay away from the children,” Rose added.

“Oh, yes. That ought to be a given, but you’re a Time Lord creation, so we can’t leave any loopholes.” He waved his other hand at the interface. “Back in the box with you. See you in a decade.” He stuffed the sonic into his suit jacket pocket, then turned back to the interface, which was still there, staring at the pair of them with frustration written all over its features. “Oh yes,” he added, feeling the Oncoming Storm flickering in his mind, “and find another face to wear. You’re not worthy of that one.”

He tucked Rose’s arm through his own and left the interface behind them First, the TARDIS, to locate the physical control box and remove the activation circuit. Then Rose could do with it what she wanted. She deserved that much recompense for the damage the Moment has caused. Perhaps, also a vacation… they never had made it to Barcelona…


End file.
